Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.

Today, we have an interview with Celia Lake, author of historical romantic fantasy, and also a librarian.

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Describe yourself like you would a character in one of your books.

Celia confidently bustled around the library shelves wearing a simple blue dress, her grey hair up in a bun on the top of her head. She paused by a book, pulling it out and glancing at something in the index before reshelving it. 

Our theme for November is A Month of Rain & Reads. Do you subscribe to the idea of curling up with a good book while the rain pours down outside. What book would you read? Would you bring tea and a blanket? What would make the moment perfect?

I love those rainy moments. (Also, for the record, on a winter’s evening when it’s entirely dark outside.) 

My favourite mode is some time on the couch. There are fairy lights on over the window and across my long bookshelves, a candle on the bookshelf across the room. I’m under a fuzzy blanket and my cat Astra is perched on or near me. There’s probably a mug of cooling tea that I can’t quite reach because it’d make Astra move. 

As for what I’m reading, I always have a lengthy list of reading I’m doing for research for future books. I enjoy that reading, but I especially treasure the chance to curl up with something different that isn’t my reading time right before I fall asleep. This particular November, there’s a good chance it’ll be The Lord of the Rings. One of my online spaces is doing a group readthrough and it’s been ages since I read it. But I’ve also got a lovely range of fantasy and romantasy to dive into as I get a minute. 

What else do you want our readers to know about you?

I’m a research librarian (working with a specialised collection) for my day job. I really love getting to dig into historical questions as well as current best practices. I bring a lot of that energy to my writing (and the rest of my life). My friends are all clear that if you ask me a question, I will blink, and then start trying to figure it out.

Why did you decide to self-publish, and what has been your biggest success so far?

I started looking at self-publishing because I knew I wanted to write something that would be hard to sell to trad publishing – and that I was likely to want to write at a pace that doesn’t work well there. There aren’t a ton of similar titles focused on historical fantasy in the 1920s! 

The thing I think is my biggest success is getting emails from readers telling me a book helped them get through a bad week or month or bit of their life. (Those are seriously priceless.) I also adore it every time I see that a book’s made it into a library collection. 

The recognition that’s made me the happiest was a review of Eclipse from Catherine Heloise at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books in June 2021 where she absolutely saw what I wanted that book to be and appreciated it. (I love all my books, but Eclipse is one of the particular books of my heart.)

What is your favourite thing about being an indie author?

I really love the freedom to go “Ok, this is what I want to do, how do I go there and bring my readers with me” without being beholden to someone else’s idea of what might sell. I can try something a little different, spend some time on a side idea, or work on a different time period. 

(I do feel it’s important to let my readers know where I’m going and to continue stuff I know they’ve come to me for in the past, too! It’s a balancing act, but there’s still a lot more room to explore.) 

You’re also a librarian, and as a book lover and fantasy nerd, I know well the mystery and wonder associated with that profession. What’s the reality, and how does it match up with the fictional archetype? 

I don’t yet have any books featuring librarians – but my next 1920s series is going to spend a lot of time in and around the library in the main magical city in Albion, including at least one librarian romance. I’m currently busy figuring out exactly how they shelve their materials in detail, since that’s about to matter a lot more than the previous brief views of the library in earlier books. I am exactly the sort of geek who has a spreadsheet to help me compare other systems that were in play around the time that library began. 

I’ve worked as a high school librarian, a college librarian focused on technology, and now as a research librarian. Like a lot of librarians, I think a lot of people writing about libraries who aren’t librarians have a somewhat skewed idea of what the job involves. There’s a lot more ‘can I borrow the stapler’ and ‘where’s your bathroom’ than fiction usually reflects! And it’s certainly not a job where you get to sit around and read all day. 

What I love about being a librarian (and especially in my current job where almost all our questions are by email, so we aren’t getting asked for office supplies) is puzzle solving. All the parts about cataloging and shelving are about helping us to find things efficiently to answer those questions or help connect people with the things they want to read or learn or know about. 

You write Cozy Romantic Historical Fantasy set in a world called Albion. What kind of artistic liberties do you take with the historical, and how prominent are the fantastical aspects?

I describe what I write as being about the magical community of Britain, currently between the 1850s and 1940s (and I’m working on research for a series in the 1480s, when the magical and non-magical communities separated). The historical parts are as accurate as I can get them (down to the weather in many cases!) Most people in Albion (the magical community) also have at least some interactions with the non-magical community, and people do a lot of code-switching, helped by enforceable magical oaths. 

The magical parts vary across different books. Two of the guiding premises for how magic works in Albion (the magical community) are that I wanted there to be a number of different ways to do magic and that I wanted people to have a range of magical ability, training, and strength. I also didn’t want the magic to break what we know about history. (Expand, yes. Change events, no.) Most of my books focus on people who are more strongly focused on magic in various ways, but most of the time magic is a help to people, but it’s not a deciding factor in their life. 

I think of it like music: a lot of us sing in the car or the shower or maybe in a chorus, but we don’t make our living at it or build our entire life around it. Magic is like that in Albion. Some people do, most people are doing other things a lot of the time. 

Sometimes I play with the combination a lot more deliberately. Old As The Hills is set in and driven by the first year of World War 2. But it also takes on some of the magical theory in play at the time – everything from Dion Fortune’s letters encouraging visualisation of protective angels patrolling England’s shores to a witchcraft ritual in August of 1940 meant to keep Hitler on the other side of the Channel. All of those bits come from at least some real-world historical discussion and documentation (though how much those people exaggerated is sometimes a complex question).

What themes are important to you, and how are they reflected in your writing?

I keep coming back to the many kinds of good relationships we can have in our lives – romances, but also close friendships, mentorship, the way teachers learn from their students, being good colleagues at work. All of those interactions make a huge difference, and having more models can only help, right? 

A lot of books take place between the Great War and World War 2, and I also spend a lot of time thinking about what it’s like to get through the hardest times in our life, and maybe look around and realise the world’s still there and choosing to engage in the large world again. 

I particularly write a lot of disability and neurodiversity representation, because I want to write stories about people like me and many of my friends, getting to have adventures, make the world better, and maybe fall in love.

And I write a lot about land magic, about the different ways we connect to the land and world we live on and with. Some of that’s about ecology, but a lot of it is about being aware of the larger space we live in and the many interactions there and our part in it. 

What are you working on next? Can you tease us?

I have a new book coming out on November 7th! Apt to be Suspicious is set in during the 1947-1948 school year at Oxford. It’s full of two people who are at university after war work they can’t talk about, cryptic crosswords, a puzzle that needs to be solved, and all the demands of being at university. Plus of course a fair bit of magic.

And I’ve just started writing Brave Truth, a romance set in 1950 featuring Claudio Warren, who we’ve seen in his school days in Eclipse and during World War II (in his best friend’s romance in Illusion of a Boar). I’ve decided that this book in 1950 is the latest point I intend to write chronologically for a number of reasons, and I’m looking forward to leaving things in a place where we can imagine the characters going forward with their lives into the 1950s and beyond. Brave Truth will be out in August 2026. 

And a few quick questions. What’s your favourite…

…book, in recent times?

I adored K.J. Charles’ most recent release, All Of Us Murderers. It’s deeply Gothic, with a main character who’s genre-aware, a second chance romance, and a lovely ending. Charles is one of my few ‘pre-order and read as soon as I get it’ authors and never disappoints. 

…game, in recent times?

I’m mostly a tabletop gamer when it comes to games. Shoutout to the Deliria (modern fairy tales) game that’s been running since 2020 and which is tremendous fun. I’m also in a Strixhaven (Dungeons & Dragons, you are all at university together) game with another set of friends, many of whom are also librarians.

…writing advice?

Figure out how your brain works, and do more of that. That’s both the interesting part and the way to make writing more sustainable for you. (It’s absolutely worth asking other people for ideas of what to try for yourself, but it’s way more important to figure out what works for you.) 

…advice for someone who wants to publish their own book?

There are tons of resources and communities out there now. Figure out what your particular goals are, and then figure out whether and how that’s realistic. Adjust accordingly, and seek out advice for the details. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel!

…source of inspiration?

I have so many ideas these days that I’m a little wary of asking for more! Going for a walk or getting in the shower usually gets something going in my brain, though. (Also all the reading I do! So much reading.) 

…way to clear your mind when everything gets a bit much?

A walk outside, music, or sitting down under the cat and focusing on petting her for a bit. 

Do you have any last words? Any shoutouts to authors who have supported you or whose books have inspired you?

An absolutely shoutout to Kiya Nicoll, friend, editor, author, and other half of my brain (we’ve been friends for 30+ years.) Kiya has made every single one of my books immensely better. I’m also so grateful to the many people in my various online writing communities for advice, commiseration, and just plain ‘what’s the least annoying way to do this particular task’ commentary. 

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Celia Lake

Celia Lake is in her early 50s. Born and raised in the Boston, Massachusetts area by British parents, she grew up loving classic British school stories and mysteries from an early age. After living in Minnesota and Maine, she came back to Massachusetts in 2015 where she works as a research librarian, writes books, and is often being closely supervised by her cat. Besides writing, Celia enjoys reading, research, knitting, cooking, and table-top roleplaying games. 

Links

• Website: https://celialake.com
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/celialake.bsky.social 
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/celialake